Editorial Judgment
To Be the Judge, Jury, and Edit-cutioner
Today’s Shelf Life is about editorial judgment, in case you couldn’t tell that from the title. Editorial judgment is a skill that all editors learn and develop through the course of their career and today I’m going to talk about it. This will be of use for anyone who is beginning a career as an editor or would like to be an editor, as well as for writers and authors who revise and edit their own writing and that of others.
I’m a big fan of editorial judgment; it’s actually the only kind of judgment I have. Actually that’s not true I have a judgment of absolute divorce somewhere in my filing cabinet. But other than that, yes.
I have spent a good bit of my career hiring and developing junior editorial staff, and for several years I was in charge of training new editors at a good-sized publishing company; this is to demonstrate that I have a long history not only of being an editor but of training editors. I’m talking about production editors, specifically, the kind of editor who knows the style manual backward and forward, spots typos, makes sure page proofs are pristine before releasing them to press, gets files to the printer on time. That kind of editor.
What I have learned from my own experience developing as an editor, as well as my experience training editors, is this: The easy part of becoming an editor is learning to find and fix every error in a text. The hard part of becoming an editor is developing the editorial judgment to know when to fix which errors and when to leave things alone.
The person who is not an editor, or who is an inexperienced editor, will say: “Well of course the answer is never leave an error alone, no amount of errors is acceptable, always fix an error.” This can be problematic when you are an editor who reports to, or is under the direction of, someone who is not an editor, and they believe the above.
This misbelief comes from thinking that an editor’s job is to remove errors from a text and leave it sparkling clean with not a single mistake left behind. Realistically, an editor’s job is to:
Remove errors and create a clean text.
Preserve the author’s voice in the text.
Complete their work on deadline to ship units on time.
Shigeru Miyamoto famously said, of delays in shipping video games to meet prescheduled release dates, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” Frankly this is no longer true because games can now be patched to correct problems that exist at launch. But anyway, the sentiment is that it’s better to ship something late and perfect than to ship it on time with flaws.
This could possibly have been, at one time, true for video games. This quote is usually associated with Miyamoto’s The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, which missed its scheduled holiday season 1997 release date and was pushed into 1998. In 1998 video games, like books, were primarily released by large production companies. There were far fewer indie games and books published, because the resources to publish them easily and cheaply—digitally—did not yet exist. In the late 1990s, there were very few video game titles launching each year that were as hotly anticipated as The Legend of Zelda. All this is to say that people were going to buy The Ocarina of Time whether it came out in 1997 or 1998. There was no substitute for it. The customers would still be waiting when the game launched.
This is not true for most books. It is probably true of the new Stephen King novel or the new Danielle Steel novel that the readers will be there whenever the book comes out. For most books, this is not the case. For debut novels this is almost never the case. Books are scheduled to publish two or three years out from when they are acquired and the marketing and sales plan begins then—two or three years ahead. The editorial calendar is set then.
You cannot simply delay a book by a month because it wasn’t ready to go to press on time. If a book is scheduled to come out on Tuesday, September 12—new books come out on Tuesdays—and you miss that date, you can’t simply launch it on September 26 and expect to get the same level of notice and sales. Some other book was already scheduled for September 26. The marketing and sales team are already scheduled to work on that book on September 26. They can’t just slot another book into their plan for September 26 because the September 12 launch was late.
I’m talking about front list fiction, by the way. I spent several years working in textbooks and that’s even more cutthroat. If your book has been adopted for fall semester 2023 and it’s not in the school bookstore by mid-August, your book is dead. You can’t just launch it in September. Or January for the spring semester. Or next fall. That book is done.
That’s why I take that Miyamoto quote with a grain of salt; wouldn’t it be better to—no. No, it would not be better to be late and perfect. A perfect book that no one reads may as well not have been perfect. That effort was for nothing.
Editors bring value to a text by improving the writing. We eliminate misspelled words and typos, identify errors of fact and bring them to the author’s attention for fixing, improve organization and flow, and we are wordsmiths. That’s how we add value to the products we work on.
As a person who has the ability to recognize excellent or perfect writing, an editor can see that value floor to ceiling. For an editor, there is no diminishment of returns. The editor, however, is not the end user (the reader) of the book. Most readers are not editors. There is a certain threshold of excellence or perfection that most readers are equipped to notice, after which additional polish or perfection of the text does not add value for them.
It’s like wearing sunscreen SPF 200. Anything above SPF 30 is pretty much wasted. SPF 30 blocks 97 percent of sun damage and no sunscreen blocks 100 percent. Above SPF 30 you experience diminishing returns. You can keep piling on the SPF but it’s only protecting you incrementally better than good old 30.
Likewise, there’s a point in editing any text where the editor is no longer adding value for the reader. They may still be adding value, but only for themself. The editor can recognize a difference between 97 percent perfect and even more perfect than that, say, 98 or 99 percent. No text is 100 percent perfect. Too much of perfection is subjective; it’s impossible.
Someone I used to work for called this invisible value. At some point, he said, we keep adding value to the product but it’s invisible to the end user. The effort that produces that value is wasted.
This is one instance of where editorial judgment comes into play. It is knowing when you’ve hit the visible–invisible value threshold so you stop polishing a text. Editorial judgment is being able to decide, on the fly and usually under deadline pressure, when to make an error based on factors like:
What happens to the schedule at this point if I put the manuscript through another round of correction? Do we miss our ship date?
How serious is this error? Is it noticeable to the average reader? And, even if so, does it affect understanding of the material?
First, not all errors are equal in magnitude. An error in the title or byline on the cover or title page is much more obvious than an error on the copyright page, which pretty much nobody ever reads. An error in a bibliographic reference is much less significant than a very similar error—for instance, a typo like a misspelled word—because, again, pretty much nobody reads the bibliographic references and, when someone is looking at a bibliographic reference, they care about finding all the information they need to locate the resource being referenced. A typo that doesn’t affect the usability of the reference is not that critical.
It’s not, however, as easy as putting every type of correction on a list in descending order of importance and drawing a line somewhere and saying, “Corrections above this level of importance will be made and corrections below will not be made.” The time and cost associated with making the correction also must factor in.
The earlier you are in a text’s journey from manuscript to printed book, the easier, faster, and cheaper it is to make a correction. Before an author signs with an agent, that author has infinite time to fiddle with the text and perfect it. There is no deadline at that point but the one the author sets for themself. It’s also free for the author to make changes. All they need do is open their document and make changes.
Once an agent is involved, time may become more essential but there’s still no hard and fast publication deadline that everyone is working toward. The agent is under pressure to sell the title and secure an advance for the author because that’s how the agent gets paid, but, again, the agent’s deadline for themself and the author may be arbitrary. The agent and author can continue to fiddle with that text, polishing and perfecting it.
When a publisher signs the book and sets a publication date, the clock is ticking. There is no longer an infinite timeline on which the text may continue to be polished. The text will flow through a number of stages which may include development and will certainly include production. At each stage, the timeline gets shorter and the cost required to make a correction gets higher.
When I say cost, I do mean dollar amount. The copyeditor typically works in a Word document of the manuscript or may work in an XML-based WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor like XMetal or eXtyles. Changes at this stage cost only a little of the copyeditor’s time and are usually, still, considered free. Once the manuscript has been typeset into proof pages (a PDF), changes are no longer free to make. The compositor—the person who operates the software such as InDesign or 3B2 to create the proof pages and make modifications to them—usually works for a third-party vendor and charges by the correction, by the affected line, or by the affected page. One or two small changes on each page of the book quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars.
Making changes after composition is complete is still more cost prohibitive. Before printing begins, prepress operators at the printer have to prepare the files for press and then create the plates that will be used to print from. A change made to the text after the plate has been created requires throwing out the whole plate and creating it again. A change made after the book has been printed, but not bound, requires throwing out all copies of the signature that has been changed, throwing out the plate, making a new plate, reprinting that signature, and re-collating the entire run. A change made after the book has been printed and bound is very expensive indeed and may require
Manually stickering over the error (a great way to advertise that there’s a serious error under the sticker),
Despining the book blocks, replacing the affected page with a tip-in, and re-covering the books, or
Throwing out the entire run and starting again.
All of these solutions are very expensive and will almost certainly delay your book’s release.
We can all agree that a book is better without mistakes than with mistakes, but at what cost? Is it worth paying $100 to correct an error? How about $10,000? Or $50,000?
Some errors are worth fixing, whatever the cost. I’ve seen a book published with a US election map frontispiece colored blue and red—Republican states blue and Democratic states red. That had to be fixed at great cost before books could ship. I’ve also had a demand to pull a book off press to fix a typo someone had noticed—the word “weekend” in a figure caption was misspelled as “week end.” In that case we let the typo go because it was not worth spending thousands of dollars and delaying the release of the book over an error that was unlikely to be noticed by most readers and that could not, in any case, affect the meaning of the sentence in which it appeared.
Very few things in the world, if any, are reasonably expected to be 100 percent correct and perfect. If you think they are, I encourage you to take a look at the FDA’s Food Defect Levels Handbook, which outlines how much contamination may exist in a food product before the FDA requires action be taken to correct the issue. For instance, the FDA requires the manufacturer to do something about it if they find an average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams of peanut butter. The regular-size jar of peanut butter you get at the grocery store is 16 ounces, or more than 450 grams. I’ll shut up and let you do the math on how many insect fragments are allowed to be in that jar.
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